Solar dust vibration

Solar, Dust, Vibration Worskhop at 37, Looe Street Gallery

Solar, Dust & Vibration workshop was held 18/06/25 at 37, Looe Street Gallery in Plymouth. As part of a International Visiting Researcher Residency funded by University of Plymouth, we hosted David Strang, who introduced an exploration of dust as both a raw material, but also the (usually) forgotten waste and remains of life.

Provocation

How to be human...
...in an artificial world
...in a world of artificial intelligence
...amidst technological complexity
...after the end of the world

Provocation

What knowledge, know-how etc. would you share; and how would you share it; in such a world?

Schedule

Solar, Dust, Vibration Schedule (18.06.25)

Images and Videos

We were given the provocation to playfully explore the creative possibilities of dust and vibration. One way of doing this was through transmitting sound through laser diodes, picked up by solar cells. This technique was developed in the [Transmission and Interference] project, by David Strang and Vincent Van Uffelen. When dust interrupts the laser, the sound is also affected.

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  Firing lasers through dust
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  Laser, Dust and Transducer
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  Some items of equipment
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  EQing Noise
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  Bouncing dust on a sheet of plastic
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  Building a Chadli Plate
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  Testing a Chadli Plate
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  Bouncing Dust on a speaker cone
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  EQing the sound from a contact-mic'd typewriter
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  Dust interfering with a laser signal
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  Programming an arduino to sequence LED blinking
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  The speed could be controlled by potentiometer
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  Some dust brought to the workshop
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  Transducers are basically the electromagnet used on speaker cones
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  Mixer adjustments. By modulating the bass, mid and high frequencies, we found we could excite and vibrate the dust sources in a variety of ways.
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  Vibrating dust mined in Canada as a justification for empire. One of our group brought dust that had originally been mined in Canada and passed off as gold to Queen Elizabeth 1st, in order to justify the colonisation of Canada. After a Canadian colony had been established, and it became clear there was no gold (or much less than claimed), the mined stone was used to build the city walls of Dartmouth. Our group member had reclaimed some stone, and returned it to Canada as an artistic and ritual act; and we talked about what it meant to vibrate and enliven this dislocated material, which had travelled so far, and was entangled in the ebb and flow of various human endeavours.
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  Working with Fisher Price record player and dust from Canada
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  Using a FisherPrice record player, to vibrate dust
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  Exploring the acoustic properties of glass within glass

Texts and Sites

[Connor, Steven. 2009. Pulverulence - The power of powder. Cabinet Magazine]

[Connor, Steven. 2021. The Dust That Measures All Our Time. The Public Domain Review.]

Cubitt, Sean. 2017. Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies. https://dukeupress.edu/finite-media

Discard Studies

Liboiron, M & Lepawsky, J. 2022. Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power. https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5337/Discard-StudiesWasting-Systems-and-Power

Marder, Michael. 2016. dust. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/dust-9781628923308/